Dirt(2024)

A Weak & Panicked Animal(en)

Enclosed by a civilised landscape, society reduces the problem of human survival to a minimum. The sidewalk, the fence, the clearing, demarcate a treaty between man and nature whereby neither one of us shall pass these thresholds lest we become subject to the law of the other.

In My Country Men Have Breasts(en)

Akbari was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007 and she lost her breasts due to the cancer. After she directed, wrote and acted 10+4 which showed her struggle with the cancer, the depiction of the artists body became central in her works. In the same year, Akbari photographed her own naked body for the photo project titled Devastation. Although it was pretty risky, put herself in danger and prohibited to exhibit Devastation in Iran due to the naked images of her own body, Akbari continued to depict her own body as a new medium and new material so that she provided a video secretly as well. In 2012, after Akbari left Iran due to the barred situation of filmmaking and arresting film makers, she uses the video that shoot secretly from her own body in 2007 and juxtaposed with new images and the song of Ahangaran, who was a singer for the war time between Iran and Iraq. As a result of her action and performance, the video project titled In my country, Men Do Have Breasts happened.

The Enclave(en)

Commissioned for the Irish representation at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, The Enclave is an immersive, six-screen video art installation by Irish contemporary artist Richard Mosse. Partly inspired by Joseph Conrad’s modernist literary masterpiece Heart of Darkness, the visceral and moving work was filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo using 16mm colour infra-red film, which captures otherwise invisible parts of the spectrum. The resulting imagery in Mosse’s work is hallucinatory and dream-like with the usual greens of jungle and forest replaced by shimmering violet. The Enclave depicts a complicated, strife-ridden place in a way that reflects its complexity, using a strategy of beauty and transfixion to combat the wider invisibility of a conflict that has claimed so many.

I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like(en)

"I Do Not Know What It Is that I Am Like" juxtaposes images of animals, both wild and domestic, and natural environments with human activity as it takes place in an apartment, and during a fire walking ceremony in Fiji. Documentary-style footage is combined with staged events. Despite the piece's lack of a traditional narrative, it bears some relationship to nature works. The segment features material from "Il Corpo Scuro (The dark body)" - animals and natural environments are seen up close and at a distance.

The Shining: Forwards and Backwards(en)

An experimental film comprised of Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING played forwards and backwards at the same time on the same screen, creating bizarre juxtapositions and startling synchronicities

Paysage Nocturne(fr)

Ki or Breathing(ja)

'Ki or Breathing' is a spare concoction assembled from slow motion shots of nature and set to a score by the much-acclaimed Tohru Takemitsu.

Untitled(en)

In this hyper-realistic digitally rendered video, sandwiches are assembled in sequence. Each component, from the first slice of bread to the last, is dropped dramatically from a height, before bouncing and settling into place in slow motion. Mayonnaise, then ham, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and the final slice on top. This perfect yet uncanny choreography reads like an exaggerated, perverse take on ‘food-porn’ obsessed advertising campaigns. These sequences repeat, the sound gradually incorporates saws and machinery, echos from empty environments, pianos breaking, smashes, crashes and mechanical crescendos like jet engines alongside eerie drones, bells, and hard rummaging noises. Another piece of bread lands, some rubber baby dolls fall onto it, some brown slop, a blanket, denim jeans, some businessmen in suits, and more slop. Ketchup, then a union jack, all encased in the final layer of bread that falls to the top of the pile to the sound of a tolling bell. Infinite continuation, loop.

White Homeland Commando(en)

White Homeland Commando takes the familiar terrain of network action drama and tilts the playing field. Reminiscent of today's popular reality-based cop shows, White Homeland Commando offers a straightforward story: four members of a special police unit investigate and infiltrate a New York-based white supremacist organization. But that is where the commonplace ends. The teleplay is shot and edited in a highly textured visual style, the colors are subdued yet somehow garish, and the sound is deliberately just out of sync with the speaker's lips. Occasional static combines with jumps in the plot — the editing is reminiscent of a television viewer flipping channels.

Mary(xx)

Moving through its five parts, the work describes a cycle of birth through to death, depicting both an eternal, universal Mary, and an earthly Mary representing human life on Earth.

Green Grey Black Brown(en)

Departing from the traditional factory lines of production on the plastic plant manufacturing industry. From there, the film expands into the realm of synthetic nature, portraying a highly engineered landscape,developed by startups. The images appear to be bound together by a dark slime—an oily, recurrent presence as a connection to the strange and gory logics of petro capitalism and global territories of extraction.Petroleum, in both refined and unrefined forms, serves as a temporal vector: it is the raw material for plastic plants, Revealing the absurd techno-solutionist vision of the future.

Good Morning, Mr. Orwell(en)

In his book "1984", George Orwell saw the television of the future as a control instrument in the hands of Big Brother. Right at the start of the much-anticipated Orwellian year, Paik and Co. were keen to demonstrate satellite TV's ability to serve positive ends-- Namely, the intercontinental exchange of culture, combining both highbrow and entertainment elements. A live broadcast shared between WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, linked up with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea, reached a worldwide audience of over 10 or even 25 million (including the later repeat transmissions).

Playpausesong(fr)

Grid(pt)

A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).

How to Smile for More Than Five Seconds(es)

A tutorial about guided meditation. Throughout the project, the spectator is invited to follow a series of steps that, if done well, will take them to a calm and tranquility state.

Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman(en)

The video opens with a barrage of explosive imagery along with an audio track of a siren taken from the 1970s TV show Wonder Woman. The following scenes are fast paced repeated shots from Wonder Woman, with several scenes following of actress Lynda Carter as the main character Diana Prince, performing her transformative spin from secretarial role into superhero role. […] The representation of repeated transformations expose the illusion of fixed female identities in media and attempts to show the emergence of a new woman through use of technology. […] The video ends with a scene of repeating explosions that precedes a blue background with white text that scrolls upwards, delivering a transcription of lyrics to the song ‘Wonder Woman Disco'.

star born brutal(mk)

'star born brutal' is a diaristic exploration of masculinity after experiencing a schizophrenic breakdown. Static memories recur and dissolve in a search for understanding and quiet liberation.

Wintopia(en)

IDFA and Canadian filmmaker Peter Wintonick had a close relationship for decades. He was a hard worker and often far from home, visiting festivals around the world. In 2013, he died after a short illness. His daughter Mira was left behind with a whole lot of questions, and a box full of videotapes that Wintonick shot for his Utopia project. She resolved to investigate what sort of film he envisaged, and to complete it for him.

Melody(en)

Although Gainsbourg and Birkin had appeared in a string of films since their magnetic collision in Pierre Grimblat’s Slogan, Melody was a bit of diversion from their collaborations since it’s a series of interwoven videos inspired by the Gainsbourgalbum. For '71 it’s a novel concept to bring visual life to an LP, but even more surprising are the short film’s amazing visuals that director Averty crafted using a wealth of video filters, overlays, camera movements and chroma key effects. Averty applies these in tandem with the increasing tone of Gainsbourg’s songs, which more or less chronicle an older man's affair with a young girl. Each song is comprised of steady, sometimes brooding poetic delivery, with refrains timed to the phrase repeats of each song, while Alan Parker’s buzzing guitar accompanies and wiggles around Gainsbourg’s resonant voice. The bass is fat and groovy, the drums easy but steady, and the periodic use of strings or rich vibrato makes this short a sultry little gem.

9/11 Simulation in Roblox Environment(en)

CGI collage short film originally premiered as part of the 'Extinction Renaissance' exhibition at the Loyal Gallery in Stockholm.